The death has been announced of John Davis, on 15 January. John was on the anthropology staff of the University of Kent from 1966 to 1990, and Professor of Social Anthropology from 1982.
Between 1958 and 1961, John read history as an undergraduate at University College Oxford, after which he moved to the London School of Economics for postgraduate studies. It was here that he met three individuals who were to shape his enduring preoccupations. The first was Paul Stirling, who was at the time undertaking pioneer work in Mediterranean ethnography; the second was Raymond Firth, who influenced his thought in the area of economic anthropology; and the third Lucy Mair, whose sharp mind and no-nonsense concise writing style he much approved of and actively emulated. Under Stirling’s supervision he undertook fieldwork in southern Italy, completing his PhD in 1969.
In 1966 John moved to Kent, part of a group of other LSE staff and students who were to form the nucleus of a board of studies later to become the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology. John often said that he was ‘made at Kent’, and certainly this was where his best work was undertaken: his influential essays on exchange, his synthesis of Mediterranean ethnography and his ground-breaking work on long-distance traders in Gaddafi’s Libya. In the early days at Kent, John both benefitted from, and contributed to, the intellectual synergy between his own work and that of his colleagues in sociology, such as Ray Pahl (with whom he shared an interest in the informal economy) and Derek Allcorn (whose theoretical acumen and sense of humour he much admired).
As a teacher, John will be remembered for his innovations to the curriculum, such as ‘Understanding other cultures’ (a joint course with philosophy), and instructively entertaining several cohorts of students during the 1980s with his creation of ‘Potlatch’, a simulation game that sought to capture the dynamic properties of the eponymous Kwakiutl institution of competitive exchange. It was also John Davis who founded the Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing in 1985, which was to place Kent at the forefront of innovations in computing applications that have now become standard throughout academia.
In 1990 he moved to Oxford as head of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, became Warden of All Souls College in 1995, where he remained until his retirement in 2008. His retirement was unfortunately plagued by ill-health and a premature withdrawal from mainstream academic life. He will be remembered as a clever man, by turns charming, funny, intellectually incisive, and always supportive of students, friends and colleagues.
ROY ELLEN
